Ozonolysis is an extremely useful transformation in organic chemistry that allows one to access alcohol, aldehyde, and/or carboxylic acid functionality from the oxidative cleavage of unsaturated compounds. This reaction is very exothermic and the peroxide intermediates, i.e., ozonides, that are generated can be very unstable and potentially explosive. Further, the reaction is often done in the presence of a highly oxygenated atmosphere, which makes it all the more necessary to control heat. For this reason much research has gone into optimizing the process control and safety of the ozonolysis reaction.
Previous examples of reactors attempt to address the problem of continuous quenching of peroxide mixtures (PM) by scaling the process down into microchannels. This approach fails to allow for scale-up as it is not capital efficient to add multiple reactors in series, and it adds considerable complexity to the process. Further, the residence time of the reactive peroxide mixtures (PM) in the microchannels is not well controlled given the non-adjustable nature of the microchannels, thus adding complexity to this type of reactor across multiple quenching chemistries.
This complexity is further compiled by the fact that the ozonides may have very different stabilities, ranging from highly unstable to highly stable. Therefore, ozonides may have very different processing requirements depending upon their relative stabilities. Indeed, some ozonides are so stable that effective quenching methods have not yet been identified and thus yields from the corresponding quenching reaction are not ideal. As such, there is a need for the discovery and development of new methods for processing such ozonides.